Sign up for our weekly security newsletter

UK – Economic Turmoil Pushed Cyber-crime 10% Up

As per the cybercrime report released by Garlik, an online identity firm, cyber-crime surged nearly 10% last year in the UK, with rapidly growing criminal activities that include a wide range of offenses such as identity theft, financial scams, spamming, phishing and hacking.

The expanding reach of Internet has made social networking and pornographic sites, an important factor for widespread Internet harassment cases, popular among people, says the report. Security experts state that under current environment, when the global economy is facing crisis, activities like phishing and spamming are likely to rise in the UK.

Tom Ilube, Chief Executive Officer, Garlik, told that online financial crimes are expected to rise in view of current economic conditions, as reported by silicon on October 30, 2008.

The report further discloses that the sharpest rise among all cyber-crimes in 2007 was witnessed in financial frauds, with a total of 250,000 cases reported, up 20% from the previous year.

In addition, the report says that cyber-criminals are becoming more professional, evident from the number of online transactions that include selling of credit and personal details. A perfect example of growing professionalism is fraud-as-a-services which have opened computer crime to those people who lack technical expertise, according to security researchers and analysts.

Security researchers further stated that cyber-criminals with technical expertise could customize the zombie computer network to enable others use it for distributing malware and launching Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks that breakdown computers.

The Garlik report further revealed that black market sites, where stolen identities and financial details of the Brits are traded, sprung up significantly from 27 to 57. On these sites, over 19,000 illicit traders were reported for transacting identities and other information.

Commenting on the issue of rising online crime in the UK, Andrew Goodwill, Fraud Prevention Specialists at the 3rd Man, leading specialist CNP (Card Not Present) fraud screening firm in Europe, said that cyber-crime is growing at a rapid pace and is plundering hundreds of millions from the country every year, as reported by BBC NEWS on October 30, 2008.